Alexander Mcqueen Paris Fashion Week 2009
McQueen Leaves Mode in Ruins
Paris
INEVITABLY, the talk of Paris manner has been less about clothes than about coin.
Retailers are worried about sales, and magazines are concerned with the loss of advertising. And most designers, listening to the bean counters, have played it so safe with their fall collections that they run the risk of choking. Fashion is in a fractured state.
Still, few designers are willing to admit that the expectations of fashion are changing, or to honestly question the hereafter for luxury goods if the appetite — largely invented over the concluding decade with calculated marketing more innovative design — no longer exists. Alexander McQueen's exceptional collection shown hither on Tuesday night, the virtually aggressive we take seen this flavour, was as much a slap in the face to his manufacture, then, as it was brave statement about the absurdity of the race to build empires in way.
With a runway of broken mirrors surrounding a garbage heap made of props from his own by collections, Mr. McQueen created a phase to symbolize the sudden crash of luxury exuberance. The clothes he sent out were a parody of couture designs of the last century, spoofing Dior's New Look and Givenchy's little blackness Audrey Hepburn dresses, as well as their reinventions by new designers at those companies in the terminal decade — himself included. It was a flake of a Marie Antoinette riot, poking fun at all the queens of French fashion.
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"This whole situation is such a cliché," Mr. McQueen said before his show. "The turnover of fashion is only then quick and so throwaway, and I recollect that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity."
Mr. McQueen, in effect, was calling mode'due south bluff when he opened his collection with a suit in a 1940s silhouette, with a nipped waist and flared brim in houndstooth wool, worn by a model who walked with her hands on her hips and posed with the exaggerated gestures of an Irving Penn photograph. That was followed by a houndstooth impress on a mink coat in a Poiret shape and wool jackets that were defaced with embroidery that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.
All the models wore hats by the milliner Philip Treacy that were fabricated of trash-can liners and aluminum cans, or recycled household objects; the makeup, inspired by the mad expect of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," gave the models the appearance of plastic faces that were all lips. The music, as well, was a brew-up of songs from his prior shows, with bits of "Vogue" and Marilyn Manson'south "Beautiful People."
This was, Mr. McQueen said, an ironic exploration of a designer's reinvention. The irony is that designers say that fashion is constantly being reinvented, yet they keep to show the same shapes and trends of decades past. (Ergo, this flavor the collections accept been fixated on the 1980s.)
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After the triumphs of his recent collections, this was a risky bear witness, entirely uncommercial and intentionally provocative, and it generated extreme reactions. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, was visibly ecstatic watching the bear witness; merely another magazine editor, afterward, compared the trash-bin styling to "a collection inspired past Wall-E." And some questioned whether Mr. McQueen, past including such obvious references to trash, was targeting John Galliano'south version of Dior, which, in January 2000, included a couture drove inspired by hobos and that led to protesters wearing plastic garbage numberless exterior the Dior ateliers on Artery Montaigne.
Throughout his career, Mr. McQueen has relished pushing people'south buttons, though maybe less manifestly since moving his shows from London, where he had developed the reputation as the enfant terrible, to Paris in 2001 after he sold his company to the Gucci Group. Mr. McQueen turns 40 side by side calendar week, so he is no longer an enfant, though his piece of work remains challenging and confrontational, especially this season, when it seems like the right moment for a deeper exploration.
While he is mocking the establishment for running circles over mode history, isn't Mr. McQueen as guilty equally the rest?
From 1997 to 2001, he was the designer for Givenchy, one of the luxury brands endemic by LVMH, and his tenure in that location was frequently marked by conflicts with direction and generally negative critical reviews. Before he showed his kickoff collection, succeeding Mr. Galliano, who had moved to Dior, Mr. McQueen offended many French journalists by declaring that the original work of Hubert de Givenchy was "irrelevant." Amy M. Spindler, the New York Times manner critic, wrote of Mr. McQueen's couture debut in 1997: "This was basically a pretty hostile collection from a gifted designer who seems in conflict about his office in the Givenchy studio. How members of the audience responded to the show depended on whether they were fascinated past that hostility and vulgarity or repelled by it." The same could exist said today.
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During his early days in London, Mr. McQueen's collections were sometimes described as misogynistic. The shows made audiences uncomfortable, and equally fascinated, most controversially in 1995 when he referenced the ravaging of Scotland past England past showing brutalized women in a collection called "Highland Rape." He later transformed models into animals with horns on their shoulders or wearing leather masks similar falcons; and in a 2000 collection, he showed models in a setting that looked like a mental infirmary. The historian Caroline Evans, in "Manner at the Border," noted that McQueen'due south aesthetic of cruelty was really culled from historic sources, "the work of 16th- and 17th-century anatomists, in detail that of Andreas Vesalius, the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin from the 1980s and '90s, and the films of Pasolini, Kubrick, Buñuel and Hitchcock."
Then much informs Mr. McQueen'south collections that things get lost or obscured. In add-on to Dior and Givenchy and Pollock, the new fall drove, titled "The Horn of Enough," included leather coats and poof dresses with a pattern inspired by Bauhaus and clowns, a magpie print inspired by the drawings of Yard. C. Escher, and dresses made of duck feathers after Matthew Bourne's production of "Swan Lake." The invitation showed an prototype of a woman with a trash bag on her caput by Hendrik Kerstens, photographed in the manner of Dutch portrait artists, which was the starting betoken for Mr. McQueen's exploration into recycling. (The image was recreated in a lid by Mr. Treacy.)
Some of the fabrics were fabricated to look like refuse, including a wet-looking black paper nylon that resulted in dresses that resembled Mr. Givenchy'due south chic styles, only made of Hefty bags. A charcoal silk greatcoat looked as if it was made of bubble wrap.
"I've never been this difficult since I've been in London," Mr. McQueen said. "I think it's unsafe to play it safe because you lot will just get lost in the midst of cashmere twin sets. People don't want to run across clothes. They desire to see something that fuels the imagination."
It's an interesting issue that Mr. McQueen raises past challenging the status quo. While he did not exactly propose an obvious solution for the times, he at to the lowest degree suggested a feasible culling to the never-ending recycling of other designers' fashion, which was to recycle his own.
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